The project is a constituent of the NIH Graduate Partnership Program and serves to coordinate the doctoral research training and the university-NIH interface. The project provides trainees with molecular and comparative pathology educational content suitable for graduate credit at partnership universities. The Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics, Molecular Pathology Unit (MPU) staff has responsibility for training and mentoring trainees. Trainees undertake pre-dissertation research within the MPU for which they receive university graduate course credit applicable for earning the Ph.D. degree as comparative biomedical scientists. The veterinary pathologists undertaking research training integrate pathology into the range of intramural research. Research topics include mechanisms of traumatic brain injury progression and protection, modeling oncogenic collaborating genes in leukemia, Ewing's sarcoma molecularly targeted therapy and function of EWSFLI1, p53 isoforms in glioblastoma, progression of melanocytic precursor lesions of melanoma, and inflammatory bowel disease. The educational infrastructure within the training consortium includes university collaboration with the Molecular Pathology Unit and builds upon an interdisciplinary and comparative orientation to problems in biomedical science. Presently there are 9 pathologists in training. There are 16 program graduates who obtained PhD degrees. Trainee accomplishments for fiscal year 2017 include: current trainees (9) have authored or co-authored 7 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles: 3 research, 3 review, and 1 clinical articles published in journals including: Blood, J Vis Exp, Inflamm Bowel Dis, Neuro-Oncology, J Pharm Biomed Anal, Lab Invest, and Vet Pathol. Current trainees have achieved a variety of recognitions: AAVLD Diagnostic Pathology Award, STP Experimental Pathology Award, Dennis Sikes Award in Experimental Pathology, CL Davis Foundation Award, W.W. Carlton Award- Purdue University, 2 awardees -2016 ACVP Young Investigator's Award,s 2016 NCI Directors' Innovation Award, 2017 NIH Graduate Partnership Program Graduate Student Research Symposium, 2016 Center for Cancer Research Fellows and Young Investigators Colloquium Poster Award, 2017 AACR Scholar-in-Training Award in Memory of William Manness. Five veterinary students participated in the 2017 NIH Summer Internship Program in Biomedical Research (SIPBR) and trained in the labs of NCI, and NIAID. Program graduates finished PhD degree programs at Purdue University in brain microenvironment in breast cancer metastasis and at the University of Maryland in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) oncogenesis and treatment.